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In this discussion, "Pop" is the music of vaudeville and Broadway and later, movies, ranging from dance bands to individual performers. "Black Pop" is all Afro-American popular forms, and also ranges from large bands to individuals, and until 1948, was called "race music."

"Country Pop" is music sung and played almost exclusively by Southern whites or Southern white migrants to white audiences." "Jazz", initially created by blacks in New Orleans, migrated to Texas, Chicago and New York. "Folk" was the "music of the poor and oppressed", and "Gospel" was 20th Century American religious vocal music.4

In this period, sheet music "constituted the largest source of income for American popular music."5

Examining the history of rock 'n' roll is to examine war; invention; regulatory action; struggles among capitalists and by labor against capital; immigration and migration; musical history; economic shifts; and the discovery and creation of new segments of our national population. Each of these contributes to the narrative, and taken together with the facts and myths and legends, makes up the story of rock 'n' roll. That study informs us about who we are and what we are made of.

In 1938, a fifteen-year-old white boy from rural Alabama who had been taught to play the guitar by an itinerant black musician, won an amateur contest at the Empire Theater in Montgomery, Alabama. Seventeen years later, at a bus stop just outside the theater ticket window, a black woman was arrested for